Economics Roundtable

After 76 months, we finally got back to the prerecession level of payroll employment.

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Jobs

The best summary of the state of our economy is the graph (below) of employment as a fraction of population for people over 16 years old. The decrease is large, but the most troubling feature of the graph is the flat trend .

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Graph-of-the-Year Candidates

Donald Marron likes European interest rates. Click on the image to get a bigger version. Can you find three distinct subperiods?

Carpe Diem - AEI (Mark J. Perry)

We hear a lot about the well-publicized increases in oil production in America’s top two oil-producing states. No. 1 Texas now produces nearly 3.5 million barrels of oil every day, almost as much as Canada’s total daily production of 3.7 million barrels. As ...

1. Amazon just launched “Home Services,” a new website platform that allows customers to shop for 700 different professional services, like general home repairs, installations, equipment assembly, home cleaning, auto repair, lessons, etc.

Proud of her federal agency’s role in eliminating due process at US colleges and engaging in lots of other forms of bureaucratic mischief, Department of Education bureaucrat Jane writes in the Washington Post that she wants to put an end to insensitive bumper stickers that are micro-aggressions, if not ...

Changes are coming for workers at South Dakota’s six public universities. The schools are reigning in hiring and cutting back hours and services as a result of the new $8.50 minimum wage that voters approved in November. ...